Although Google can find prominent mention of Daniel Dennett's three-year tenure as the chair of the original Loebner competition committee on earlier versions of his personal Web site, there is no mention of it on the site now. Perhaps, I thought, this whole business is so old that he's forgotten about it. Not so.

"I have a very clear memory of how I came to resign ... Danny Bobrow and I put together the idea of a revision of the rules (as described in "Brainchildren," p. 29). But when we put the idea to Loebner, he would have none of it ... If the Chairman of the Prize Committee makes a carefully thought-out proposal about how to salvage the competition, and it is summarily rejected, there is really nothing left to do but resign, since my opinion apparently was not considered worth serious discussion. Which is what I did."

Dennett's commentary in his book "Brainchildren" is telling. He explains that "serious contestants" from "the world's best A.I. labs" aren't interested because "passing the Turing Test is not a sensible research and development project for serious A.I. It requires too much Disney and not enough science."

Does that sound as snotty to you as it does to me? Well, it gets better:

"We might have corrected that flaw," wrote Dennett, "by introducing into the Loebner Competition something analogous to 'school figures' in ice-skating competition: theoretically interesting (but not crowd-pleasing) challenges such as parsing pronouns, or dealing with enthymemes (arguments with unstated premises). Only those programs that performed well in the school figures -- the serious competition -- would be permitted in the final show-off round, where they could dazzle and amuse the onlookers with some cute Disney touches. Some such change in the rules would have wiped out all but the most serious and dedicated of the home hobbyists, and made the Loebner Competition worth winning (and not too embarrassing to lose)."

Let's forget Turing's actual test, he says; let's rather find a way to eliminate competitors that don't come from the best A.I. labs! Having done that, we can toss off a few cheap tricks to amuse the people who are not as clever as we are.

Speaking for myself, I think Sarah Hughes is a god. Her gilt-medal performance in the 2002 women's figure skating competition was one of the most breathtaking long programs I've ever seen, and I could not care a fig about whether she could pass her "school figures."

But when I pressed Dennett on the mainstream A.I. community's rejection of Loebner, he replied:

"Why should 'academic A.I.' take Loebner seriously, when he persists in running a competition that still doesn't test the linguistic abilities that a serious language comprehension system must have? Don't expect aeronautical engineers to be interested in high-jump competitions."

"I may be missing something, but it sure seems to me that [Loebner's] main mistake has been in not belonging to the right club," I answered. "He's brash, he's zany, he hangs out with hookers, he makes disco floors for a living -- he doesn't teach at MIT or write books on the nature of consciousness. As far as I can tell, that is the main reason that the Loebner Prize is not embraced by the ACM Turing Award crowd. That and the fact that A.I. had a two-decade history of overpromising and underdelivering, which his prize showed up in neon."

"Well, I've given you the reason," replied Dennett. "Think about it: If you and your lab/team had devoted years to developing a truly competent language-comprehension system, but it could be beaten by somebody's cheezo hobby system because the rules didn't permit putting a real strain on the competitors, you wouldn't enter that competition. You wouldn't take that competition seriously. You don't enter your Ferrari in a 'race' to the bottom of the mountain that can be won by the first car that drives over the cliff and lands upside down on the finish line..."

The last communication I had from Dennett simply said, "Loebner couldn't even consider postponing the contest for a year or so even if that was the only way to make it respectable. Too bad for him and his reputation. We tried."

It didn't occur to me until later to point out that a computer program is not an automobile and that the only real risk of entering and losing the competition is embarrassment.

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